Israeli raid kills four Palestinians in West Bank camp: new toll

An Israeli air strike and gunfire have killed four Palestinians at the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent said Thursday in an updated toll.

Israeli forces withdrew from Nur Shams in the morning, AFP correspondents said, hours after the military announced around midnight (2200 GMT on Wednesday) it had launched a "counter-terrorism" operation.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said on social media platform X that its "ambulance teams have just transported an 18-year-old man who was killed by the Israeli occupation forces in Nur Shams camp", bringing the death toll in the raid to four people.

Two were killed by an air strike and two by live bullets, the Red Crescent said.

The Israeli army said "an aircraft struck two terrorists who posed an immediate threat to the forces", and troops "eliminated two" militants in an exchange of fire during the operation.

One of the fatalities was identified by his family as Nidal Abu Abeid, a vegetable seller at the northern West Bank camp, near the Palestinian town of Tulkarem.

His uncle, Ziad Ali Abu Abeid, 52, told AFP at the morgue that Nidal "wanted to build a future".

"He wanted to make a living for himself," the uncle said.

"The (Israeli) occupation came and killed all the ambition he had, like for any other person in the camp."

After road workers cleared rubble left by Israeli bulldozers that destroyed the tarmac to clear any explosives, crowds of young men carried the dead bodies through the streets of Nur Shams to their family homes. Some of them fired automatic weapons into the air.

- Wrong place, wrong time -

According to a military statement, the troops who shot dead Abu Abeid and another presumed militant "found an M-4 rifle" on one of them, without elaborating.

But Jolan Abu Abeid, Nidal's cousin, told AFP that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and was not himself a militant.

"He grew up with us," she said through tears as a crowd formed inside the home where the body which was wrapped in a Palestinian flag.

"He was with the (militants), just standing with them. The Israeli army targeted them."

Israeli forces regularly carry out incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank but until several months ago had rarely struck the territory -- occupied since 1967 -- from the air.

The Nur Shams raid came amid intensifying violence in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, triggered by the Gaza militant group's October 7 attack.

Including the latest deaths, at least eight Palestinians were killed in less than 24 hours in the West Bank, authorities and medics said.

Three Palestinians, including an Islamic Jihad commander, were killed Wednesday in an Israeli strike on a car in Jenin, a stronghold of Palestinian armed factions in the northern West Bank.

One Palestinian was killed by gunfire in the Al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah.

At least 444 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers across the West Bank since October 7, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Thousands more have been arrested by Israel in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority says.